Bill Gregory, director of Annandale Galleries in Sydney, darts across his crowded stand to rescue a Zadok Ben-David sculpture that jostling crowds are threatening to upset.

Jan Minchin of Melbourne’s Tolarno Galleries watches with mild concern as young girls have their photo taken next to – well, almost on top of – a
Patricia Piccinini
motorcycle sculpture.

Sutton Gallery has borrowed a security guard from elsewhere to ensure people don’t pull on the polystyrene chains of Peter Robinson’s large installation, and by the fourth day Dominik Mersch has roped off his stand to protect his Locust Jones graffiti scrolls, one of which is simply standing on the floor, bound to be scuffed by a stray shoe or 10.

Photos were banned inside the exhibition centre, home to the Hong Kong International Art Fair, which closed on Sunday, but mobile phones were everywhere, capturing the art at the 260 booths over two floors from galleries in 38 countries.

None of the gallerists seemed too concerned: with the more serious, art-buying clientele, the young snap-happy crowd that flocked to ArtHK11 helped push attendance past 46,000 last year to 63,500.

Art fairs aren’t quite McDonald’s, where the burger tastes much the same in Beijing and New York, but there are parallels.

That said, the pretence that marks some northern hemisphere fairs and biennales was, if not absent, diluted. People may have been drinking Veuve at $HK132 ($16) a glass, but they look as if they’re having fun. That youthful vibe reflects the age of the fair itself – this was its fourth year – and the fact it takes place in a region still learning about collecting, where millionaires are more likely to buy at auction than through galleries; a region that’s woken up suddenly to the economic impact of culture.

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The Hong Kong government is pouring $HK21.6 billion into its West Kowloon Cultural District to be run by Australian Michael Lynch, due to open in stages from 2015, featuring – among other things –15 performing arts venues and contemporary art museum M+.

As Singapore did in the late 1990s, the government wants to broaden Hong Kong’s image beyond that of a financial hub with good shopping. Sixty per cent of its 36 million annual visitors come from mainland China, often on one-day shopping trips. If some can be convinced to stay overnight for a show, or catch the not yet built fast train home after one, it could be a canny investment.

Across town, the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust is redeveloping the historic Central Police Station into a cultural industries complex. Former Sydney Biennale artistic director David Elliott is advising the club on the project, which will include a library, gallery and theatre.

That coincides with the arrival of northern hemisphere art juggernauts who see Hong Kong as a gateway to the region. The company behind Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach recently bought a 60 per cent stake in ArtHK, with the option of going to 100 per cent in 2014. Over the past year, too, international galleries such as Gagosian, Ben Brown and de Sarthe Fine Art have set up, and global auction houses such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s – not yet allowed to hold auctions in mainland China – are posting record sales from Hong Kong, now the third-largest auction market after New York and London.

The upshot is that Hong Kong and its art fair are set to grow and the 12 Australian galleries at ArtHK11 want to hitch a ride. Trade may be flat at home, but a nine-hour flight away, most reported good sales, some to Australians – more than a dozen collectors, dealers and consultants attended – but many to collectors from Asia, the US and Europe, the clientele galleries looking to break beyond our small market want.

Emerging Australian artists in the less than $30,000 bracket seemed to sell best – partly, perhaps, because they weren’t competing directly with the big international-gallery artists.

Sullivan & Strumpf sold all 15 of its Sam Leach paintings ($9500 to $16,500), and Roslyn Oxley her two Del Kathryn Bartons at $US30,000 ($28,000) each. Daniel Crooks’s videos were a hit at Anna Schwartz’s stand and Dominik Mersch sold a large, $11,000 Locust Jones scroll (an institution reserved the second), plus some smaller pieces at $1800 to $3000 each. Grantpirrie sold all 15 of its
Ben Quilty
paintings, some Lionel Bawden pencil carvings and six of its seven Todd Hunters.

Jess MacNeil was popular at Gallery Barry Keldoulis, with a Hong Kong collector buying her perspex sculpture for $32,000 and a Taiwanese following up a purchase last year with a video work for $8500. Tim Olsen, whose stand with Grantpirrie was one of the more elegant, sold only half the 10 Lake Eyre paintings by his father John, mostly to Australians. Still, at $US100,000 to $US110,000 each, he would have taken more than most. Oxley, too, took close to $700,000 from the sale of Yayoi Kusama sculptures, a multi-panel Isaac Julien work and the two Bartons – by no means everything on her stand.

Commissions and exhibitions were also strong: Mersch says he has lined up commercial gallery shows for Locust Jones in Berlin and Asia for 2012, and Louis Vuitton looks like commissioning Conny Dietzschold artist Ho-Yeol Ryu for its Singapore store. Sullivan + Strumpf expects to see Leach included in a big offshore project next year, and Bill Gregory says he received two commissions for Ben-David sculptures from Jakarta and Hong Kong., while Tolarno’s Jan Minchin says Ben Armstrong could feature in museum shows in the US and Taiwan.

Irene Sutton knows the fair can pay off in tangential ways. She showed Raafat Ishak in Hong Kong last year, which led to an invitation to appear at Art Dubai, which in turn led to the $70,000 sale of his 194-panel immigration installation to the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah. Ishak was also in the inaugural pan-Arab contemporary art exhibition at the Venice Biennale this year.

There’s already plenty of talk about how the fair might change under its new owners. Will it lose what Asian flavour it has and simply become Art Basel Asia? Is Singapore’s new art fair, held for the first time in January and run by a former Art Basel director Lorenzo Rudolf, a threat? Only time will tell.